Meriwether Lewis Elementary School Pilot

This week the yolink education team worked with fourth and fifth grade classes at Meriwether Lewis Elementary school in Portland, Oregon.

The fourth grade classes have been studying the Oregon Trail. Each of the students had different topics relating to the Oregon Trail they were researching and also preparing to share their research with the class. The fifth grade classes were studying the Mount St. Helens eruption as it was the 30th anniversary. They also were interested in finding information on Harry Truman, a man that had lived very close to the volcano at the time of the eruption.

Yolink was able to help them search the links on a web page about the Oregon Trail, as well as scan Google links. They quickly understood how yolink works and appeared to like it!

Here is what one student said, “Before this I’ve had to search through five Google pages to find what I was looking for.” – Fourth Grade Student

We will keep in touch with the fourth and fifth grade classes to see the other ways they have been able to use yolink.
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La Costa Canyon High School

Recently, the yolink team had the pleasure of working with teachers and students at La Costa Canyon High School in California. We wanted to share a story from one of those classes.



The assignment the students were working on was to search Popular American poets. The students had to choose a poet, identify the technique, include biographical information about the author as well as quotes, and discuss the influences/motivation/inspiration for that poem.

Yolink came in very handy for this project. We showed the class how yolink's 'scan text' option helped them find quotes related to say - poetry or work or creativity. The students were smart and picked up on yolink really fast. They were soon using yolink to the best of its abilities.

Some really good insights from this trip included a quote that we often end up quoting - "Whenever you get out in the real world, no matter what job you have, you need research. And its not what you know, but how can you find it."


I'm sure that just as they surprised us with their instantaneous liking of yolink, we surprised them with yolink's capabilities.
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Marshall Elementary Pilot

Marshall Elementary in Vancouver, Washington

5^th grade social studies students from Marshall Elementary were learning about the Treaty of Paris, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre. 4 events that are all so different and there’s so much to know!

The goal of the day was to learn how to find credible resources online and to use yolink to find the information within those sources. Students learned syntax tricks to help them easily find credible sources as well as learning how to use yolink in their school library online databases.

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Cherry Creek Pilots

Last week, yolink team members flew out to sunny and snowy Colorado to meet with staff, administrators, librarians and students to teach them about optimizing their search and finding information faster.

We worked with all different ages, learning types and schools. Students were studying everything from current events to online coding. We used our information literacy curriculum to show students and teachers how to better search online and how to use yolink. Now they can find credible information and write their paper faster.

Everyone also loved our free integration with EasyBib!

A yolink engineer came out as well! He talked about how yolink was created and about being an engineer in today’s world. Intro and advanced computer science students learned about what it takes to be an engineer and where they should start.

Quote of the week: "This is the most valuable thing they've [teachers] taught us all year! Yolink and EasyBib will save me so much time." - Anonymous 10th grade honor student

Overland High School - Aurora, CO

Horizon Middle Schoolers were beginning research projects as part of their advanced learners program. Students learned search skills to begin their "Night of the Notables" project, current events podcast and Science Olympiad.

Michelyne Gray is now ready to teach all of her colleagues how to use yolink in the classroom and everyone was so excited to hear about our integration with EasyBib!

Eagle Crest High School was kind enough to let us be a part of their pep rally in exchange for our knowledge of information literacy. Go Raptors!

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Vancouver School District

Thank you librarians! Yolink team members presented at a staff development meeting in the Vancouver School District in Washington State. The presentation and discussion focused on the topic that was in my last posting, information literacy! With so much information available on the internet, how can students sort through it all and find valuable information?

Some of the teachers' struggles were:
1. Students don't know how to maximize the search engine
2. Students' use search engines instead of our subscription databases because they feel overwhelmed. How can we show students the tools to finding credible sources online?
3. My students effectively know how to type in many key words to narrow down their searches but the search engines bring back results with only some of their keywords, not all of them.

Some of the benefits they saw and learned:
1. Using yolink text search can help my students look for ideas and concepts because the words are in close proximity to each other in the article or ebook
2. Syntax can help my students find credible sources outside of databases
3. yolink can help my students find very specific information while saving clicks

We participate in staff development meetings very often. If this is something that you want to set up, let us know! We can do an online meeting or in person.
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First pilot...Success!

Ms. Montaperto's computer class at PS 254 in Brooklyn, NY completes the first YEP pilot!

Yolink team members worked hands-on with a class of 4th graders working together to learn how to search better and find valuable information. Students learned how to use syntax, judge website authenticity, find valuable information and how to turn it into a secondary source with integrated tools. In Alan November's words, they "learned that online search is an active skill, not a passive service".

Some of their favorite things were less clicking back and forth, no more skimming long web pages, and the ability to easily pick out content rich sites.

After the 4th graders learned how to use yolink, they then taught the 5th graders how to use it as well.

"I am so glad that we are learning this great new tool. Many times searching can be very frustrating! I am excited that our class is working with Yolink to help kids everywhere obtain better information in less time and with less frustration!" - Ms. Montaperto
Check out more of their comments on the pilot here!



If you'd like to participate in a yolink pilot, click here. Stay tuned to see more pilot stories and ideas as they are completed!



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